On Sunday night I stayed up late with America’s Next Felon director Ron Johnson to place cues into the film.

When a composer delivers a score, the timing of when and where to put the music is usually communicated via time codes.  But really, that’s still a very crude way of communicating.  It’s very hard to write down stuff like when to start fading in or out and by how much.  So, I just ended up sitting with him and just talking through all the cues.  It took about 4 hours to go through all the music for a 60+ minute film, but it was worth it.

Unless Ron comes up with additional tweaks, my commitments for that film are done!  If this was a true dramatic underscore, I’d want to be more involved in the mixing process, but for this film, it’s mostly just background music — so I’m not that picky about how loud/soft the music needs to be.  In the other words, precise mixing isn’t required for my music to do its job this time, as it’s really not supporting the visuals that actively.  So I probably won’t see the film again until it’s finished.

My hat’s off to Ron, though, as he’s planning to shoot a short soon, to use it as an experiment/practice for his next feature film already.  The guy just has something cooking constantly — and he makes it look so effortless.  I really enjoyed working with him.

What’s next for me?  I’m not exactly sure.  I’m holding down a full-time contract web work at the moment, so I don’t have a pressing need to find the next paying music job.  I produced a full-length album and scored a feature in the 6 months since resuming my music business, so that’s not bad.

I feel the need to put some energy into my own music (especially now that I’ve been making music for others for a while), plus I’m going to be developing a big film web site, too.  So I think I’m going to take it easy on the music front for a while.  I’m excited about maybe writing some new songs or at least practicing playing them.